We would also appreciate your feedback on Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia. Please write feedback hereHere you can read media articles about the Chinese Buddhist Encyclopedia which have been published all over the world.

Only parts of seven Lectures (Lectures 1 to 6, & 12.) of a total of 24 Lectures are included herein. I unrestrainedly recommend your study of The Teaching Company's "Buddhism " for the complete 24 Lectures

1. He was born into a princely family in a region of northern India that is now in southern Nepal .

2. He often is depicted sitting very serenely, with his feet crossed in front of him and his hands folded in his lap. He is the very picture of calm and contemplation . This is the image that has drawn people to the Buddha for many centuries, and it is the one that conveys most explicitly the experience of his awakening .

2. For that matter , he did not accept the idea of a permanentself .Momentary phenomena give the illusion of continuity, like the moments of flowing water that make up the current of a river or the flickers of burning gas that make up the flame of a candle.

A. These are the most authoritative texts in the Hindutradition and the oldest surviving religious texts in India . The earliest hymns in the Vedas can be dated about 1500-1000 B.C.E..

8. One of the last hymns in the Vedic collection posed what I think of as the classic Vedic question. Let me summarize it {intellectuallove of G-D} so that you can get an impression of the content of these hymns and feel the force of the question:

There was not then either nonexistence or existence (either asat or sat). There was no sky, and there were no heavens. What was it that covered everything? What was its protection? Was there a bottomless depth of waters?

There was neither death nor immortality , neither day nor night. The One breathed, though uninspired by breath, by its own potentiality. Beside it nothing existed...

Who is there who knows? Who can tell its origin? Who can tell the source of this creation? The gods are on this side of the creation. Who knows, then, where it came from and how it came into being?

Where this creation came from and how it came into being—perhaps the highest overseer in heavenknows, or perhaps even he does not know.

9. You can see that as these early priests composed their hymns around the year 1200 B.C.E., they asked a question about the origin of the universe . The question took them, in a sense , beyond the gods . They wanted to know where everything came from, with emphasis on the word know. You can also feel just a suggestion, perhaps, that if they knew {understood} the source of everything, they would know the connection between themselves {as modes} and the rest of the cosmos, and they would be able to control it {and achieve peace of mind}.

1. One day, Aruni told his son that it was time for him to take up the life of a student, and he sent him away to study. When he came back at the age of twenty-four, feeling swell-headed and arrogant with all the things he had learned, his father asked him whether he had heard about the "principle of substitution"—"by which one hears what has not been heard of before and thinks what has not been thought of before." Shvetaketu says that he has not, and Aruni begins to teach him.

D. We will see that the Buddha developed a very different idea of the nature of the self , but his goal was similar to the goal of Nachiketas. He wanted to know the nature of the self so that he could be released from the power of death . {Spinoza 20:18}

2. Pedagogical; it is an incentive to true good behavior in order to be reborn to a higher station.}

CG1:38 & 39
III. If samsara is considered fundamental and is also a burden, how can a person deal with it? The answer is to follow the law of karma , the law that governs the passage from one life to the next. {Good and bad are subjective terms; furthermore, in Spinozism there is no 'free-will and therefore no praise-no blame; Spinozism differs with the 'karma ' hypothesis.}

1. People who follow the ordinary norm situate themselves in a network of duties and responsibilities. They are mothers or fathers, teachers or students, priests or kings, and they are bound by the rules that govern each of these social roles.

[1] (1:1) After experience had taught me that all the usual surroundings of sociallife are vain and futile; seeing that none of the objects of my fears contained in themselves anything either good or bad {subjective terms}, except in so far as the mind is affected by them, I finally resolved to inquire whether there might be some real good {G-D} having power to communicate itself, which would affect the mind singly, to the exclusion of all else: whether, in fact, there might be anything of which the discovery and attainment would enable me to enjoy continuous, supreme, and unending happiness {better °PcM}.

[3] (3:1) I therefore debated whether it would not be possible to arrive at the new principle {Foundation Rock}, or at any rate at a certainty concerning its existence, without changing the conduct and usual plan of my life ; with this end in view I made many efforts, but in vain. (3:2) For the ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads—Riches, Fame , and the Pleasures of Sense : with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.

We have already seen (in 1.6) that suffering , or unsatisfactoriness {loss of peace of mind} (duhkha, Pali : dukkha ) was propounded as the first of the Four Noble Truths . Suffering figures also as the first of the three "marks," or "characteristics," of existence along with impermanence (anitya , Pali : anicca ), and no-Self , or the absence of a Self (anatman , Pali : anatta ). These three doctrines , of course, are closely interdependent. Things are "suffering ," that is, not finally satisfying, because they are impermanent : they do not last forever, or even for a moment, but are in a constant process of change; and partly because of this, there can be no Self , that is, no "abiding ego," no "unchanging me," and consequently no "mine.">S89

2. Because of the causal continuity between moments in the flame. it is possible to say that I am the "same" person from one moment to the next {and do judge my very real-to-me emotionalcondition at any one moment}.

3. But when we look closely at the flame, we realize that it changes every moment, and the idea that one moment is the same as another is nothing but an illusion .

In a way, you could say that they are, because obviously there are lots of things that we hold on to in this world that we really like, that are associated in one way or another with this personality we're terribly fond of and anxious to protect. And when that's stripped away it begins to feel like a negative experience; it can be harsh in some kinds of situations.

Another comparison they use—quite common—is to think of the personality as a flame, as a fire. This is actually useful because it also suggests at the same time that the personality is "burning" in a painful way. It's a fire that we fuel by all of the karma that we produce; all of the actions that we perform to achieve a certain goal or to avoid a certain unhappystate. All of that karma is like throwing logs on a great bonfire, and it burns—burns constantly—changing from one moment to the next. So, Buddhists think of the personality as flowing like a river and burning like a fire.

C. To understand what Buddhists have in mind when they make this series of connections, you might take a glossy advertisement from a magazine and ask what kinds of illusions it fosters, what kinds of desires it is meant to arouse, and what comes into being as a result of those desires . Most of these desires are quite benign, of course, but they feed the creative process that, for Buddhists leads to more death and rebirth .

1. The first way to answer this question is to understand that nirvana forces us to take seriously the negative Indianevaluation of samsara . If samsara really is something to be avoided, then the most positive thing to do about it is simply to negate it, to bring it to an end. Nirvana is this negation.

Finally, the third thing that you want to do—in a lot of ways this is the most important because it really is the foundation of all other Buddhist virtues—is to cultivate wisdom {understanding}. Here the word is pañña. It actually comes from the great Sanskritroot "jna," which is cognate with our "k-nowledge," with the "k-now" of "k-nowledge." So, pajna, pañña, is in a sense , "prognosis"—to know the nature of the world and to know where it's going {chain} so that you yourself can become detached from {enlightened —organically interdependent with} it and begin the process that leads to nirvana {PcM}. What do you know? Of course, particularly, the reality of "no {permanent} self ."

{Truth 2—true subjective reference- personal}it is possible {necessary} to take the ordinary categories of life seriously in a provisional and conventional way {chain of natural causes with its joys and sorrows}.

2. These momentary phenomena give the illusion of continuity, like the moments of flowing water that make up the current of a river or the flickers of burning gas that make up the flame of a candle. TB1181{4}.

For all their differences, however, the NikayaBuddhist schools also held a large number of views in common. Thus, although we shall pay some attention to divergent opinions at the end of this chapter, we shall focus first on the basic doctrines that held NikayaBuddhism together. Secondly, as we shall see, many of these same basic NikayaBuddhistdoctrines were not abandoned by the Mahayana . To be sure, Mahayanists extended them, added to them, reinterpreted them, and critiqued them, but for the most part they did not fundamentally reject them. Many of the doctrines that follow, therefore, can be considered to be basic to the whole of Buddhism .

Lecture 12 - TB1:181

{1}. I {Prof. Eckel} have to say in passing that this is the concept that I've spent most of my adult life studying. This is really where I put my feet down most firmly in the study of the Mahayana . So, I present this to you not just with a kind of theoreticalinterest but something that sort of strikes me in the gut. The doctrine of Emptiness , I think, in a lot of ways is one of the most profound and challenging religiousconcepts {that of achieving peace of mind} in the world , and one that if you can grasp, if you can even just get a taste of, will help you see not just the basic categories of Buddhism {and Spinozism}, page 182 but also lots of other important categories in life in a radically different way {Spinoza's Dictum}.

{2}. So, let's start out with a basic analysis of this concept, of Emptiness . Emptiness can be understood, I think, as a radical extension of the concept of "no {permanent} self " in traditionalBuddhism . This is a concept that we've already talked about. And let's lay it out for ourselves somewhat methodically. We ask ourselves, now, as the lectures are moving slowly through the study of Buddhism , "What concepts of the self have we already learned?"

1. If everything is empty, there can be no difference or "duality" between nirvana and samsara . and there can be no difference between ourselves and the Buddha .

2. This means that nirvana is right here, at this moment {this is the 'cash value' of Emptiness —Peace of Mind }, if we can only understand it correctly. It also means that we are already Buddhas if we understand that the nature of ourselves is no different from the nature of the Buddha {Spinoza's pantheism—everything is a part of G-D},

2. Conventionally; from the point of view of ordinary life , it is possible {necessary} to take things seriously {your child deathly ill}.

Lecture 12 - TB1:184-5

From a conventional point of view—from the point of view of ordinary experience— you have to take it seriously. You know, you wake up in the morning, you got a job to do, you need to bring a page 185 paycheck in at the end of the week, you've got people whose lives make a demand on you—brothers, sisters, mother, children—they've all got questions that you've got to do something to try to solve. And no matter how much you try to separate yourself from all of those issues, they are there, man, and if you step away from them you're going to bear all sorts of consequences that are going to be painful to you.

That's conventionalreality ; that's ordinary reality as we face it in our ordinary experience {Truth 2}, but ultimately, according to the doctrine of Emptiness , that does not exist {but it is in memory }. It just isn't there. It has no identity. Mother? Who's she? Brother? Who is he? This place that we're sitting in, this classroom, what's that? Where are we? There's nothing here. Who am I, speaking? Oh, I'm not here. That's all an illusion {Deceived? when all is a real memory .}. It's empty {It was a link in the natural chain of events: things would not be what they are now without that link.}. There's nothing here for us to talk about.

Now a true understanding of Emptiness holds {synthesizes} both of these two together simultaneously {and achieves peace of mind}. This is well worth thinking about. This is a pretty good thought experiment that pretty soon becomes a life experiment, to hold both of these two things together simultaneously; to take seriously all the conventional issues that we got to deal with in the world , and realize, at the same time , it isn't there. It's not there, {it is perishable}.

2. It also appeared in a lecture by the Dalai Lama about the nature of the self . After giving several reasons why the self did not exist, he smiled and asked, "if there is no self , who just told you this?" He answered his own question by saying, "Just the self " or "Just me!"